Berlin Companion Podcast

Send us Fan Mail Love it or hate it - Berlin can and will keep surprising you. Sometimes those surprises will be less welcome but sometimes they will make your day, your week or even your next 20 years. Like this story did for me. In the last episode of Season 2 of the podcast, let me take you to a place I fell in love with from the go. Not a palace or a fancy apartment house - a factory site in Kreuzberg. Few of the former could put you on the trail that leads to history of espionage, histor...

Send us Fan Mail An old Yididish proverb says: "If you want to make God laugh, tell him about your plans". The author heard booming laughter from above and thus planning to launch the last episode in the series had to be postponed. In the meantime you can enjoy a repetition of one of my favourite stories from and around Potsdamer Bahnhof: the story of a cemetery that was the first Berlin place for many arrivals to see and the last (the very last) one for a few to set their very metaphorical f...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode of "Berlin Companion Podcast" we are travelling back in time to the second half of the 17th century to witness some royal shenanigans (including several weddings, an extramarital affair, a couple of deaths and a crowning) and follow the fate of a lovely royal palace, whose ghostly outline might or might not be still visible there on quiet moonlit Berlin nights... And whose gardens were the birthplace of Prussia's favourite veg. You will find Berlin's 1748 ci...

Send us Fan Mail Those of us living in the city centre, close to industry sites or a very busy street junction know the smell only too well: fuel, burnt rubber, melting plastic and unspecified chemical stench that might or might not make your skin crawl (sometimes literally). Luckily for most, the days of potentially lethal air pollution in big cities like Berlin seem to be over. But in February 1987 West Berlin and West Germany were in the thick of it. Why this was not the case for the DDR i...

Send us Fan Mail Are you afraid of the dark? The answer is is most probably yes. Few people are comfortable not seeing where they are going, or what might be lurking ahead. An extreme form of that fear is known as noctophobia. When in the 1930s Nazi authorities introduced blackout regulations in Germany - strict orders forbidding using any sources of light that could potentially reveal the size or the position, or even individual locations in a city - three things were clear: th...